


600 Pieces of Eight

by Greenninjagal



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Blood, Dee is a Pirate, Human Trafficking, I'll take that as a no, Is it still sympathetic if Dee kills a bunch of people, It goes nearly exactly how to think its going to go, M/M, Pirate Ships, Virgil is a trading merchant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:55:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22641427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greenninjagal/pseuds/Greenninjagal
Summary: He had thought they would kill him.Instead the Pirate Captain, with eyes so light they looked yellow, had looked down at Virgil, as his crew cut into the hapless sailors. Virgil could still feel where the man had clutched his jaw with those silk gloves and forced Virgil to look up at him, at those unreadable eyes, and he could still hear the ringing voice in his head as the man called him “Pretty” and said he’d “fetch a good price”.***aka Virgil's trading ship is attacked by pirates.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders/Deceit Sanders
Comments: 19
Kudos: 241





	600 Pieces of Eight

**Author's Note:**

> an ask I got on tumblr and boi this was a good mistake.

**"Tie him up,”** The man says.

Virgil is not panicking. He is far past panicking at this point. Panicking is an island that Virgil can’t even see on the distance and he is drowning in the sea of hysteria around him.

He struggles against the arms holding him down on the deck, ignoring the threat of the blades hanging just over him-- blades that were already slick and red in the mid morning sun and smelled like copper. His arms strain against the grips on him, his feet kick and his back arches. It’s useless though, and he knows it. For every sailor on their ship there had been four pirates, and now?

Now it is just Virgil.

The gruff man who is holding him throws him to the salt dried deck of the merchant ship ignoring the screams from behind Virgil’s gag, the pleads, the curses. His head lands just shy of the puddle of blood that was the only reminder of the First Mate, splattering of crimson that glistened in the sunlight. 

Virgil and the First Mate hadn’t gotten along at all, but Virgil had watched the Pirate Captain run his own cutlass right through him and Virgil had screamed so loud they stuffed his mouth with a leather patch.

Virgil twists his arms until he thinks they’re break right out of their sockets, tears burn behind his eyes, and the gag makes it near impossible to swallow. He feels the rope twist around his wrists too many times to count, knot in an intricate way that only a seaman would have known. 

He had thought they would kill him.

Instead the Pirate Captain, with eyes so light they looked yellow, had looked down at Virgil, as his crew cut into the hapless sailors. Virgil could still feel where the man had clutched his jaw with those silk gloves and forced Virgil to look up at him, at those unreadable eyes, and he could still hear the ringing voice in his head as the man called him “Pretty” and said he’d “fetch a good price”.

They were going to keep him like a pet. They were going to sell him.

And Virgil thinks he’d rather have been tossed overboard or run through with a saber or _anything else._

His chest scrapes at the floor, someone’s hands were in his hair forcing his cheek into the deck. The salt spray tastes exactly like his tears. Some nameless form towering over him shouts a command, but Virgil can’t hear it at all. Their shadows are huge compared to Virgil’s. They block out the sun itself.

Sounds blur together.

The shadow over him swings something downward, heavy and metallic.

And when Virgil wakes up again his legs are being dragged over the gangplank to the Pirate Ship. His head stings and there’s something sticky rolling down his forehead that makes it hard to focus on anything. There’s a pirate on either side of him, dragging him, like he’s a piece of cargo, just another thing stolen off the merchant ship that was stupid enough to attempt to sail this passage when the rumors of pirates and sunken ships were floating about the sea foam.

He blearily watches two sailors lighting torches. The smell of oil burn the back of his throat and his head lolls forward again.

Mercifully, Virgil’s unconscious before they send his trading ship down to the sea floor in a blistering funeral pyre.

When he comes to again, he’s on the floor of a room. For a tantalizingly awful second Virgil truly thinks it had all been a nightmare, that he was still in the seaside inn of Valerie. But the sway of the floor is too familiar, the rocking of a ship was engraved in Virgil’s bones and it makes him want to throw up the mutton they had for dinner the previous night.

A dinner which Virgil realizes, he had with people who are all dead now. They’re dead and he’s not.

They replaced the ropes, and it takes Virgil too long to notice: instead of the chafing hemp fibers, cutting into his skin, there are chains that rattle as he moves sluggishly. The cuffs hook his wrists together and his neck and bind him to the floor with padlocks thicker than than Virgil’s fingers. The black metal shines in the oil lamp light, dark and cold and unforgiving. It’s polished like brand new and unbreakable.

There’s movement across the room, movement that makes Virgil’s breath hitch right in his throat until he can’t breathe at all. 

Its a large room. There’s a physical bed, and a desk not far away where the oil lamps sit surrounded my star charts and maps. The windows behind the desk are covered by dark red curtains that make Virgil think of the blood dripping from the low ceiling to the floor. There’s gold on the desk too, gold piece and an sixpence and pieces of eight that look to be more than Virgil could make in a year of selling his cloths and embroideries. The bookshelves are full, but Virgil gets sick looking at them. 

Someone once told him books are a gateway to the soul, and Virgil wants no part in knowing the soul of a pirate captain who killed handful of innocent men and now had him chained up like a pet.

The Captain is sitting at the desk rolling a six pence between the fingers of his yellow gloves staring at it as if it is the most interesting thing he has ever seen. Virgil is acutely aware that the only thing between them is that desk.

“If you had to guess,” The captain says without preamble, “How much do you think you are worth?”

Virgil is a merchant. His mind runs the numbers even when his throat is to dry to do anything other than gasp for air. He tugs on the chains,putting as much space between him and the Pirate as possible.

“I think perhaps 300 pieces of eight,” The Captain held up the coin and peered down at Virgil. “Unless you are the sickly sort. Are you?”

He’s not, but he feel like he is. His skin burns and bristles at the same time, and his traveling outfit feels like a second skin he is quickly growing out of. His lungs twitch gasp in his chest and his dark hair falls over his left eye.

The Captain watches him for a moment, two, three, before pulling his boots down from the desk and standing up. His steps are measured and sure and Virgil tries to shrink back from them but there’s no place to go. The metal collar around his neck holds his head in place as the Captain forces him to look up at him again.

They’re barely a breath away from each other, barely an inch, and Virgil tries to burrow his head down but the man’s hold is too tight on the soft flesh under Virgil’s jaw.

“Your Captain asked you a question,” The man said.

Virgil squeezes his hands into fists, “You’re-- You’re no captain of mine.”

“It speaks,” The Captain sings mildly amused. “Does it sing too? Tell jokes like a court jester?”

Virgil strains to turn his head but hold tightens and the pain causes Virgil’s jaw to lock. He’s body shakes, but his glare is something he got from his mother, and his mother never wavered. “It bites, picaroon!”

The Captain laughs right in his face. With his free hand he uses the pad of his thumb to roll over Virgil’s cheek bone, stilling Virgil with the touch. 

“What a fearsome creature we found at sea,” He muses, watching as Virgil’s face darkens with humiliated blush.

With less than a hand full of inches between them Virgil can see the detailed work in the collar of his black jacket: the golden finery that swirled like snakes up the folded collar and around the hems of the sleeves. It was done with an unsteady hand, an unpracticed hand.

“So speak, creature,” The Pirate says, “How much to do you think you are worth?”

“I’ll make you loose money,” Virgil snarls. 

“I doubt it,” the Captain says oh so calmly. “With hair as dark as yours? Skin pale as snow? Eyes like whirlpools? I do believe you’ll be the talk of the port.”

Virgil gnashes his teeth, but the Captain merely tuts at him and brushes back a lock of his hair. “Unless of course there is a reason you can think that I should allow you to stay on my ship.”

Virgil doesn’t respond beyond tensing his shoulders. The captain seems to find it fit to twist the lock of hair in his hand as if analyzing it. Acutely, Virgil is aware that this was the man who called him pretty.

Not that Virgil had never heard that before: his mother had said his slim face was more fitting for a girl and his father had had joked that a beard wouldn’t have looked good with his eyes. The girls in town had hummed and haaa-ed over him before he had taken to the sea with his parents that first time. Then with salt in his hair the drunken boys in the taverns had begged him not to leave. Their affections had been wasted.

The Captain hums. “350 piece of eight, I think.”

“You’ll pay 350 to get rid of me,” Virgil shoots back.

Those yellow eyes flicker in the lamp light, the corners of his lips twitch. “Then I must know the name of the man who’d cost me so much.”

Virgil’s jaw snaps shut.

The Captain hums again. “Interesting.” He let go of Virgil’s jaw finally allowing him to burrow his head back to his chest. The Pirate took a step back with a dismissive way of his hand.

“I am Captain Dee, The Serpent of the Sea,” He says. “You are aboard my ship _the Siren’s Song._ ”

_“_ You’ll toss me over board if you know what’s good for you.” Virgil hisses.

Captain Dee’s head tilts ever so slightly, although he doesn’t even bother to look over at Virgil at all. “I wasn’t aware the fish could admire such beauty.”

“I wasn’t aware that the Captain of a ship was a bilge rat.”

Captain Dee hums infuriatingly again. He walks a few more paces to his book shelf and removes a book, with careful intensity. Then without paying Virgil any mind he settles back on his bed and flips it open to a predetermined page.

Virgil isn’t sure why that annoys him. He rubs his own hands over his jaw where the Captain had touched him to where the metal collar kept him stationary. There was something intense about the Captain that made Virgil’s skin prick, the way his focus seemed to zero on what was in front of him, unwaveringly. 

Virgil didn’t think anyone had looked at him that intently before.

And to be suddenly dismissed just as easily?

Virgil grits his teeth as he sits on the floor, listening to the silence of the room. The walls creak and wail, singing their own ode to the sea but beyond that there’s no sound of the crew running the sails.

The silence should have been nice.

But instead all Virgil can think about is how he’s on a pirate ship and if he doesn’t die here, then he’ll auctioned off in some marketplace where he’ll never touch the sea again. About how he’s never going to see the hills of Valerie again and his parents will live on believing that he died at the hands of a Pirate like everyone else on that ship. 

“Why did you kill them?” Virgil asks before he really thinks about it.

Captain Dee raises his eyebrow at him from beyond the book, “I wonder if you realize that any other Pirate would have killed you for talking like that to them.” 

“I don’t,” Virgil picks at the hem of his trousers, “There’s a reason they’re smarter than you.”

Captain Dee smirks ever so slightly. “Mouthy little sea creature.” He flips a page. “They pissed me off, so I killed them.”

“And I didn’t?”

The Captain takes great care to look over at him, “400 pieces of eight.”

“In a choice between getting rid of me and buying yourself a decent cloak, I hope you are prepared to leave the market empty handed.”

“What’s wrong with my current cloak?”

Virgil blinks. “Besides the terrible stitching and embroidery?”

“450.”

“There goes your new hat too.” Virgil snaps.

Captain Dee just laughs at him, yet again. “Will you cost me my entire fortune, little sea monster? 500 pieces of eight.”

“I don’t think you know how currency works.”

“Oh?” He says. “I believe I do. The more valuable a thing is, the more I should sell it for, correct?”

Virgil doesn’t say anything to this because the Captain had put down his book and leaned on an arm to stare at him. In the lamp light he looks like a nightmarish creature that stole children from their beds and terrorized villages like the one Virgil grew up in. His yellow eyes spoke of a promise of _something_ and Virgil can’t quite put a name to the feeling that rose up in his throat.

“And if there is something I decide I can’t live without,” The Captain says slowly, “I should not sell it for anything at all, yes? No matter what price is offered to me?”

The metal cuffs around Virgil’s wrists and his neck feel too cold and too tight.

Dee hums again and leans back to his book. “600 pieces of eight.”


End file.
